The input method was invented in 1976 by Chu Bong-Foo, and named after Cangjie (Tsang-chieh), the mythological inventor of the Chinese writing system, at the suggestion of Chiang Wei-kuo, the former Defense Minister of Taiwan.

Chu Bong-Foo released the patent for Cangjie in 1982, as he thought that the method should belong to Chinese cultural heritage.

Unlike the Pinyin input method, Cangjie is based on the graphological aspect of the characters: each graphical unit, called a "radical" (not to be confused with Kangxi radicals), is re-parented by a basic character component, 24 in total, each mapped to a particular letter key on a standard QWERTY keyboard.

The basic character components in Cangjie are called "radicals" (字根) or "letters" (字母).

(For a more complete account of the 76-odd transpositions and rotations than the ones listed below, see the article on Cangjie entry in Chinese Wikibooks.)

The names form a rhyme to help learners memorize the letters, each group being in a line (the sounds of final characters are given in parentheses): The typist must be familiar with several decomposition rules (拆字規則) that define how to analyze a character to arrive at a Cangjie code.

In the preface of the Cangjie user's manual, Chu Bong-Foo wrote in 1982: [in translation]In terms of output: The output and input, in fact, [form] an integrated whole; there is no reason that [they should be] dogmatically separated into two different facilities.… This is in fact necessary.…In this early system, when the user types "yk", for example, to get the Chinese character 文, the Cangjie codes do not get converted to any character encoding and the actual string "yk" is stored.

Typical touch-typists can type Chinese at 25 characters per minute (cpm), or better, using Cangjie, despite having difficulty remembering the list of auxiliary shapes or the decomposition rules.

[6][better source needed] The decomposition of a character depends on a predefined set of "standard shapes" (標準字形).

For example, in the Cangjie provided on Windows, the code for 產 is YHHQM, which corresponds not to the shape of this character but to another variant, 産.

Typing punctuation marks in Cangjie thus becomes a frustrating exercise involving either memorization or pick-and-peck.

However, this is solved on modern systems through accessing a virtual keyboard on screen (On Windows, this is activated by pressing Ctrl + Alt + comma key).

Since Cangjie requires all 26 keys of the QWERTY keyboard, it cannot be used to input Chinese characters on feature phones, which have only a 12-key keypad.

Version 6 has not yet been released to the public, but is being used to create a database which can accurately store every historical Chinese text.

Most modern implementations of Cangjie input method editors (IME) provide various convenient features: Besides the wildcard key, many of these features are convenient for casual users but unsuitable for touch-typists because they make the Cangjie IME unpredictable.

[9] The Cangjie input method offers a good starting point for this kind of application.

[Translation] The dictionary appended [to this book] is based on the 4800 standard, commonly used characters as proclaimed by the Ministry of Education.